Word: textbooks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...textbook time again. In the next few weeks millions of American schoolchildren will be confronted by thick history books with uplifting names like Rise of the American Nation or The Free and the Brave...
FitzGerald's account begins in the early 1800s, when U.S. schools relied heavily on textbooks because of a shortage of trained teachers. The dependence was so marked that textbook use in Europe became known as "the American system." The authors, often clergymen, had no problem defining the national identity: it was white, Protestant and suspicious of foreigners. The Rev. Jedidiah Morse, for example, a friend of Dictionary Compiler Noah Webster's and the author of America's first geography textbook, described the Spanish as "naturally weak and effeminate...
Sitting Bull's revenge did not come until the 1960s. The catalyst was the civil rights movement, which forced textbook publishers to do some justice to the role of blacks in American life. But other ethnic minorities, as well as women's groups and antiwar protesters, demanded redress. Organizations from the.B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League to the Council on Interracial Books for Children all pushed for revisions of textbook passages they considered demeaning. Even poor Squanto was taken to task by the Interracial Books people because by helping the Pilgrims, he had given...
...result: in little more than a decade, American textbook history has become a crazy quilt of revised judgments...
...revisions, she feels, has been high. Because of the need not to offend anyone, history texts are not written any more. They are "developed," writes FitzGerald, by editorial teams, sometimes involving a dozen people "and many compromises" to encourage acceptance by as many school systems as possible. A typical textbook project, the author reports, had nine consultants, including one for "learning skills" and one for "values." Such editions are continually revised to keep up with fashions. In 1975 many text houses were so distressed by women's group lobbying that they ordered editors to avoid such terms as "fatherland...